Most great comedies have a straight man: the singular character for all of the other deranged weirdos in the cast to bounce off; the foil to zany schemes; the figure whose poise and sense reveals the frivolity of those around him. They are rarely remembered as the star but they are crucial to the humour and the entire functionality of the plot. Think Jim Halpert in the US Office, Michael Bluth in Arrested Development (a cult favourite), or Ben Wyatt in Parks and Recreation. They are the unsung heroes of the script.
The political equivalent is the managerial type: a policy wonk, across and deep into the detail, interested in things like ring binders and briefing documents, unmoved by fits of passion and stress. The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, might be the platonic form of this man – forged in the years he spent advising the police service in Northern Ireland, where he had to operate with a cool head and emotional detachment. The problem for Labour and for Fine Gael in Ireland is that they are parties almost entirely full of the straight-man managerial types, the foils. And entirely devoid of the actual storytellers. Even Sinn Féin has adopted the managerial quality in recent years under Mary Lou McDonald – as the party sought mainstream electoral credibility, it lost its narrative ability.
The world is too different for Ireland’s old narrative to work
Politics needs both to work. Without the calm and guiding hand of the manager, the entire thing falls apart. Without the energy and charisma of a storyteller – Boris Johnson, Bertie Ahern – the country has nothing to believe in. Johnson and Ahern, for all their flaws, could sell their version of the country back to its voters.
This matters now more than it may have ever done in recent Irish history. The populist tide sweeping western Europe has been building up for some time now. Immigration – legal and illegal – and a housing crisis has left an economically disenfranchised white working class increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo. Establishment politicians have ceded ground to agitators on the left and right – Marine le Pen in France and more recently the likes of Sahra Wagenknecht on the German populist left. Ireland long thought itself immune to the problems general to Europe – isolated by facts of geography, soft power, neutrality and misplaced belief in its unimpeachable liberalism.
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But this exceptionalism was wrong – the Dublin riots in November and occasional outbreaks of disquiet on the streets since is proof enough of concept. No matter how many times we point out that it is just a small fraction of the electorate, the truth is that for unhappiness to froth over into physical demonstration it has to have been simmering widely for some time. The local and European elections may have proven Ireland is so-far resilient: the centre held, Simon Harris is popular, aspiring politicians running on anti-immigration platforms remain on the fringes. But with the agitators hovering at the gates, it’s time to reach for a new national story.
The world is too different for Ireland’s old narrative to work. In Europe, as Eoin Drea pointed out in these pages last week, Ireland is seen as a freeloader on security, a quasi-corporate tax haven, a country that “preaches about fiscal discipline, yet simultaneously disregards its own financial rules”. Meanwhile in the United States, Ireland has lost Joe Biden and does not wield the same soft power it once may have. But the country is rich, well-educated, far from the weak, poor, former colony that was dragging its feet in the 1970s. There is an opportunity for Simon Harris – popular, far less managerial than most in his party – to sell this back to the country. He first needs to look to his British counterpart and learn his mistakes.
Take the UK Labour government’s early days in office: it is a party warning the nation that there is a hard winter coming, that the looming budget is full of “tough choices”, that people will have to make sacrifices to make up for years of Tory economic mismanagement (this rhetorical device is lifted straight out of David Cameron’s coalition years playbook: Labour has ruined the economy, it’s not our fault you are all miserable).
[ Starmer promises 10-year plan to fix NHSOpens in new window ]
But in all this doom-mongering (necessary, though it may be) there is one thing lacking: a coherent and compelling story about why people must sacrifice even more; an explanation of what Labour wants from power; a line on what Labour believes Britain is and can be under its rule. The danger, here, is simple and obvious. It’s in these rhetorical vacuums that clever communicators emerge to shepherd people to the extremes – this is where Nigel Farage gets his energy from. Whatever government might form in Ireland after the upcoming election should take heed: the buttoned-up managers might make things work but they are not sufficient on their own.
There is an instinct in centrist politics that emotion and feeling are damaging to the real fibre of serious government – that they are childish, that they corrupt, that they are qualities to fear in a voter as much as they are to fear in a politician. But it is an instinct worth resisting: the sensible managerial centrists have a place in the party and in the civil service, but if they can’t tell a story then they will never really run a country.